New wearable would test for stress and coach you through it

The creators of a new wearable want to quantify your stress — then teach you to deal with it in a productive way.

Olive, an electronic wristband much like a Fitbit or Nike Fuel band, will take measurements from your body and combine them with information you tell it about your life to identify stressful moments. But instead of encouraging you to get your heart rate up like fitness wearables, Olive draws on meditation, deep breathing and yoga to coach you through tough events and keep you calm.

Olive is raising money through an IndieGoGo campaign to expand and continue testing, and they’ve already raised nearly 150 percent of their goal. They hope to be in production by Fall 2015.

Sensors collect information like the speed of your heartbeat and changes in the temperature of your skin and communicate with your phone’s calendar and your location. It will learn when you have a meeting, how nervous you are while you’re there, and your sleep habits the night before you have a stressful event, according to their campaign.

When it senses a stressful event, the bracelet will light up or tap you and ask if you want to do a breathing exercise or meditation to help stay calm. Olive’s software designers work with physicians, researchers and therapists to come up with the exercises, and the longer you wear your Olive the more information it will have to suggest them to you.

Because Olive has no screen, it works with a phone app to lead some of these exercises. You can prompt these exercises by a swipe on Olive’s surface, and they’ll adapt to your lifestyle the longer you wear it.

In concert with the app, Olive will track information about good moments and stressful ones over time, find patterns and make suggestions on how to make changes.